We Are Interviewing James Galanos. This Is for the FIT Archives. I'd Like
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James Galanos AOH47_01 GREEN: [00:00] We are interviewing James Galanos. This is for the FIT archives. I’d like the interview by commenting that there is no question about your extraordinary talent and my own sense of you as a brilliant, major designer. One of the questions of course that always operates for anybody who is doing research on this field is what is the magic? How does it happen? Where does it come from? Who are you? What early influences? Why? Why you? I have a very simple system, which is that I maintain that good designer are very much like good buildings, they last. And to me you are the Acropolis so let’s take it from there. Can you start just with the autobiographical things? Mommy, daddy, you know the whole thing. GALANOS: Well, what can I say? Start from there. [01:00] The seed must have been very very young because my beginning was tender age of, at least, ten. And the strange thing is that I pursued fashion even as a young child, not knowing anything about fashion but my tendency went towards clothing rather than just art. 1 GREEN: It was [attending?] for women or for men or for both? GALANOS: For women. GREEN: For women. GALANOS: And my father was an artist although he never fulfilled himself totally so I assume that’s where I got the seed. GREEN: Who were your parents? GALANOS: My father -- both my father and mother were born in Greece, in Macedonia, and came over during the early part of the century, I believe around ’16 or ’17 [02:00] and being part of that wave of immigrants that came over trying to find a better life and so forth. And the first settled in New York and eventually settled in Philadelphia and ended up in a small town in Southern Jersey. So my background is not one of glamour as far as locale. I grew up in a very very small town, which really had no art per se. GREEN: What was the town economics like? GALANOS: Middle class. Comfortable. My father had a restaurant so during the depression years -- I remember those fairly well -- we had everything, a lot of people didn’t have anything. GREEN: You ate anyway. 2 GALANOS: We certainly did. But my father was a very good provider and he was totally [03:00] devoted to his children, I have three sisters and myself. And he encouraged me -- GREEN: Where were you in the constellation of the siblings? Were you the youngest? The oldest? GALANOS: I am the third. GREEN: So there were two girls before you? GALANOS: Two older sisters, myself and then my baby sister. So we are about a year apart. And that’s it as far as background goes. GREEN: Because you were surrounded by a lot of women in your life -- in that early period -- was that part of it do you think? GALANOS: No, I don’t think so. Not at all. It’s just that I was very much -- even as a child -- a loner. I stayed by myself a lot. I used to sketch constantly, ever since I was able to handle a pencil and I worked my father’s restaurant and while I was working behind the counter or [04:00] as a cashier, I would always be sketching. And it always had to do with clothes; I was just fascinated with clothes. 3 GREEN: Is there any early memory of a stimulus in terms of glamorous clothes: a movie star, a theatre star, a magazine layout? GALANOS: Well not really except of course I did like going to the movies and even as a very young child I had a tendency of going towards very sophisticated movies that were probably way beyond what I comprehended at the time. Nevertheless, I was drawn to those glamour gals of the MGM [jury?] like Garbo and [Emory Sheer?] and things like that. GREEN: When were you born, James? GALANOS: I’m 61 years old. I was born 1924. GREEN: Well then you were just, like what, ten years old when that was all happening? GALANOS: So I remember going to the -- instead of going to the cowboy films I would always go and see those other kinds of films that, you know, the older folk would go to. [05:00] And they just fascinated me. GREEN: Were you conscious of the clothes at that time? GALANOS: Oh very much so. GREEN: And Adrian must have been somebody to [choose respect to?] GALANOS: Oh yeah, very very much so. Even as a child -- even I would do shopping with my mother and I would 4 really select her clothes. And I would say, “Mother, nope, that’s not good enough.” And if she said, “Oh, well I can’t afford one.” I would say, “Let’s not buy that, let’s wait and get something...until we can.” And my mother would listen to me and also with my sisters eventually. And I was very very demanding as far as what I thought they should wear. GREEN: And they accepted -- GALANOS: I had better taste than they did. I really did. GREEN: Oh I’m sure that’s probably true. GALANOS: And I must say they followed suite. You know, it was really a question of economics. If they couldn’t afford it, they couldn’t afford it. But I really had a [06:00] feeling of clothes; colors, shade, and I wanted them always to be elegant and well dressed and so forth. I never went towards jazz or just trendy things even. Whatever, they weren’t (inaudible) at the time. GREEN: Go back to the movies just for a moment. Right off the top off your head suggest some people you thought had the elegance that you eventually wanted to project for your family and certainly for your clients? 5 GALANOS: Well I never related the two together. I mean the one thing, after all that’s a dream world and the other is reality. I never really went in that direction, taking a role model. Later on as far as I thought had style -- of course I became a very close friend of Rosalind Russell in her later years. And of course Roz was my great drama. [07:00] She could be terribly elegant or very flamboyant. Sometimes got a little bit carried away but basically she had a lot of style. She could put on anything and make it look good. And I learned a lot through her when I came to Hollywood. Although she really let me have complete say. And we became very very close I must say. GREEN: I know a great deal about that period, certainly and particularly in relationship to fashion because I have done endless work on it. And it seems to me that Travis Banton and the clothes that he did for Carole Lombard and that molding of that image -- because the early Lombard was -- GALANOS: They were fabulous, really fabulous. And the things that he did for Dietrich, like Desire and Angel, those -- to be honest with you, the paisley pleated gown [08:00] that she wore in Angel was duplicated by Yves St. Laurent just a couple of years 6 ago, almost verbatim. So he had great influence. I mean a lot of the French designers, including us over here, really have taken those people and have used them as inspiration. And some, let’s put it this way, have copied them verbatim. But they were strong, they were good. You had Charlie [Ben?], you had Adrian, and Arlene in the later days was fantastic in what she did. Unfortunately a lot of these California people are not given due credit. When you see some of their really good things, it puts all of the New York people to shame. GREEN: Well certainly we -- you said something interesting before which we all recognize that motion pictures -- I’ve always said about them that they dealt with the world of the extraordinary. And television dealt with the world of the ordinary. [09:00] And the reality is however, when you look back on the clothes. Leave out the things that are unrealistic in terms of real lifestyle. But I go back to Lombard because I remember the early -- very early -- appearances of her and she was nothing more than kind of a sexpot. And when Banton took her over, he molded her. He taught her to have a stand. He taught her the simplest things that he had learned from Madam 7 Francis in New York. You know, that that kind of elegance. And I see that in you year after year after year where one gets the feeling that the woman who selects a gown (inaudible) and stays with it and allows herself to let that dress support the image that she wishes to project -- the same thing happens. You see -- when I associate you with elegance it’s because I’ve seen it. I’ve seen people with new money [10:00] and not the greatest taste be directed by you and suddenly you are into this extraordinary person making an entrance to a restaurant or a room because she has learned to do it. GALANOS: It’s true, we have, of course, I don’t know all of my (inaudible) but I have gotten involved with a lot of them because I do travel throughout the country and we have developed certain women who before had a different image and weren’t buying so called couture clothes.